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Licensing resource series: The most popular resources for 2016

This is the latest installment in the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) Licensing & Compliance Lab's series highlighting
licensing resources.

With 2016 drawing to a close, we thought it would be interesting to
look back on the resources that garnered the most attention
throughout the year. While this series generally focuses on drawing
attention to perhaps lesser known and older resources, we wanted to
end the year by looking back on resources that many users already
know and love.

With the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) still being
one of the most popular free software licenses in the world it's
unsurprising that people have lots of questions on how it works. The
FAQ is a nice resource focusing on the older license, and even as
many projects upgrade to or choose the GNU General Public License
version 3 (GPLv3) for their projects, it's still great to see so
much interest in understanding version 2.

While this resource was already covered in our inaugural edition of
this series, it ended up making the top list as well this year.
Once you understand the GPLv2 in detail you can quickly get up to
speed on the latest version of the license with this simple guide.

And once you have the basics down, this very detailed FAQ can fill
in the picture for you. As GPLv3 adoption continues to spread, this
resource has grown in popularity to eclipse the similar FAQ for the
GPLV2.

Once you understand the various versions of the GPL, it's time to
get some freely licensed software. To make this task simple, the
Free Software Foundation publishes a list of endorsed distributions.
These distros are guaranteed to come with only free software, so you
can have a computing system you know is under your control.

But far and away the most popular resource we make available is our
directory of free software. The Directory lists over 15,000 free
software packages making it easy for users to find the software they
need.

We hope you liked looking back on some of the most popular resources
we make available. While free software licensing isn't terribly
hard, having these tools and guides makes our more than thirty years
of experience available for all. Resources like these are made
possible thanks to the users who support our work, here's what you
can do to help: